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Modi promises a second revolution

Updated: May 17, 2014, 07:00 IST

Narendra Modi has triumphed in the election and will be India’s new prime minister. What should we expect? There are many detractors.

Narendra Modi has triumphed in the election and will be India’s new prime minister. What should we expect? There are many detractors. But their hostility lacks plausibility, whether one considers his economic craftsmanship or his commitment to secularism. In fact, as in the case of the 1991 reforms, constituting what we can call a First Revolution, we stand again at the edge of what we can call a Second Revolution.
To begin with, this is an occasion for celebration by Indians. Modi will have travelled from poverty and low-caste (OBC) birth to the highest office in the country. Unlike Barack Obama, who had the advantage of education at Columbia and Harvard, and whose rise to the American presidency broke the mould that only whites could become president, Modi was not born into privilege. He lifted himself up by his bootstraps when he was too poor to have boots on. If i may borrow Tony Blair’s brilliant description of Princess Diana as the “people’s princess”, Modi promises to be the “people’s prime minister”.

This will depend, however, on whether he succeeds. Modi has his critics. They challenge his success with growth in Gujarat and furthermore allege that Gujarat’s performance is marred by poor social indicators. They also claim that he will undermine secularism: just look at 2002. But both critiques are mistaken and several are even intellectually dishonest.

On growth, take the critique that Modi can take no credit for Gujarat’s growth because Gujarat grew even before Modi came on board. This is false. Economists Archana and Ravindra Dholakia have shown that the trend growth rate in Gujarat was below the national average in the 1960s, above it in the 1970s and below it again in the 1980s. The assertion that Gujarat always grew fast, including in pre-Modi decades, is wrong.

But then, critics say: Gujarat has grown but has bad social indicators. These critics are committing the “Amartya Sen fallacy”. We have to take, not levels of the social indicators as he does, but rather changes in those levels. For Gujarat, the levels have been low but changes in levels put Gujarat among the high performers in almost two decades, as detailed in my recent book with economist Arvind Panagariya.

We know from our experience with robust growth after the 1991 reforms that growth is a strategy that “pulls up” the poor above the poverty line. But Modi has also built on Gujarat’s culture which has always emphasised that we must produce wealth but use it not for self-indulgence but for the good of mankind.

When i met with him last year, i was struck by the fact that among his heroes was Swami Vivekananda. Where Bengal had been into bhakti marga (man and God), Vivekananda had chosen karma yoga (man and mankind ). One had to be in the service of mankind, as the great 15th century poet-saint Narsinha Mehta exhorted Gujaratis in the celebrated bhajan (Vaishnav Jana To) that was Gandhiji’s favourite.

2002 is the first refuge of Modi’s opponents. How can the “butcher” of Gujarat, who massacred many Muslims, be allowed to lead our great nation? Increasingly, however, people retort: how could we let Congress rule India when, in 1984, twice as many Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi in what was a heinous pogrom when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated?

But one cannot justify a smaller transgression by pointing to a larger one by the accuser. The fact is that no alleged crime has been so extensively investigated as the 2002 communal riot; and no one has been able to find Modi culpable. Besides, not a single communal riot has broken out since 2002 under Modi. Gujarat now boasts of more Muslims in the police relative to the Muslim population than almost any other state. Gujarat’s Muslims have experienced nearly the sharpest decline in poverty.

The prime minister needs to address the nation forthwith and declare that he will return India to a high-growth path by boldly opening the economy, as he did with Gujarat, to trade and foreign investment. He should also emphasise that social spending without the revenues resulting from growth is a surefire recipe, as the ill-advised UPA-II government demonstrated, for inflation that will harm, not help, the poor. He must also unleash key institutional reforms that he has already embraced as his agenda to rid the country of corruption in politics and in bureaucracy. He can do no less.

The writer is University Professor of Economics and Law, Columbia University

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